The road to Obamacare

Yesterday the Obama administration announced that it is delaying the implementation of Obamacare’s employer responsibility provision. Now employers won’t have to worry about compliance with the provision until 2015, after the midterm elections. Announced without fanfare on the Treasury Department Web site, the story was designed to escape the attention of all but those with a legal need to know. Bloomberg News broke the story.

Samuel Johnson famously observed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He might have added that the road to Obamacare is paved with big lies. Just about everything President Obama said to promote passage of the Obamacare legislation was blatantly false, as is now proved every day in the fullness of time.

The delay in the implementation of the employer mandate is designed to obscure one aspect of the profound damage the law is doing every day. It will continue to do such damage so long as it hangs over our heads. This is one of the points made in James Capretta’s comment on the delay. It should also be noted — as Jeffrey Anderson notes — that the delay in implementation is a lawless act on the part of the Obama administration. Both the falsehoods supporting passage of the law and the lawlessness of the delay in its implementation are part of a larger pattern..

The Obama administration’s solicitude for big business (employers with 50 or more employees subject to the mandate) apparently doesn’t extend to families and individuals. Bill Kristol asks: “Shouldn’t House and Senate Republicans move next week to delay the individual mandate as well? Will Democrats stand up on the floor of Congress to defend the proposition that businesses deserve relief, but not people?”

Capretta anticipates the administration’s response: administration officials will argue that employees can still get coverage in the health exchanges if employers don’t offer coverage. But, Capretta notes, the premiums that dumped workers would find in the health care exchanges to which they would be relegated will generally be far higher than those typically charged by employer-sponsored plans, and will not be tax-preferred.